Vancouver, Canada is a great place to live, consistently rated as on the top five livable cities in the world. Not everyone, however, lives in gentrified, glass-faced, condo towers overlooking the mountains and the Pacific, shopping at Whole Foods and wearing the latest fashions from North Face and Mountain Equipment Co-op.

A great many live in the margins and struggle to mind and soul together. A marginalised group identifying themselves as a band of misfits hears of an expat Kazakh restaurant owner being extorted by the local branch of the Kazakh mafia work together to free her the clutches of the Blue Horde, while at the same time ensuring they won't be bothering anyone in their group again.

----------The Blue Horde'ssoldier, Murat, reminded Naz of an obese Caspian seal with mange, a delipidated upright freezer with a patchy beard, Brutus’ stupider and eviler twin brother. His head was shaved into a crew cut like a dog’s chewed-up and spit upon tennis ball.

He had eyes liked stewed teabags, skin the colour of old newspaper, ears like the handles of a rugby trophy, distended and with more hair in and on them than a wild pig. There was a scar running down his cheek that looked like the two pieces had been joined with a welding torch.

His teeth were yellow and stained, crooked, half of them stainless steel crowns and fillings. Complete the portrait with grey-black stubble littered over acne scars like the ice on the Ural River just after spring breakup.

It smelled like he was hoarding a sack of goose shit under a stinking sweatshirt that looked like it had been washed in an ashtray. The stink of body odour – deadly, like with most sub-humans – stuck on him like lesions on a leper.

There was something hard and unformed about him, like a man who had grown up forced to eat gravel and had a soul full of ashes to match. Naz scanned the walking Douglas Fir tree for crude prison tattoos and her suspicions were confirmed.

If this – what? “Man” didn’t describe him -- wasn’t vor, then he was only a short droshky ride away. .